Tumult-iverseFragpunk is like every shooter, everywhere, all at once - and could be Netease's next Marvel Rivals (if the dev plays its cards right)Competitive FPS, Fragpunk, revolves around the central mechanic of Shard Cards, which change the rules of every round.Image credit: VG247 Article by James Billcliffe Guides Editor Published on Feb. 26, 2025 Fragpunk is like every shooter, everywhere, all at once.When a mysterious element called Glunite appeared, it shattered the Shardverse and gave Lancers their otherworldly abilities, pulling people from different realities into a kaleidoscopic series of parallel universes where they now work as mercenaries collecting Glunite for their own ends.But Fragpunk feels like a confluence of simultaneous realities on more than an aesthetic level. The main game mode is a Call of Duty-esque Search and Destroy bomb defusal, ties are settled with a series of Warzone Gulag-style 1v1s, there are boing-boing movement pads like a battle royale, the gun economy and handling call to mind CS:GO, while the mixture of that with heroes is similar to Valorant, then the presentation of those heroes - with lavishly produced comics and animated backstory videos - is reminiscent of Blizzards Overwatch.To see this content please enable targeting cookies. However, the unique aspect of Fragpunk that both ramps up the chaos and holds it all together is the Shard Cards.Dealt between every round, Shard Cards place one-off modifiers on the next match. As you get kills and perform objective actions throughout a full game, you build up points which let you invest into different Shard Cards, or save up to pile everything into a particularly perfect power-play.These effects can range from relatively simple - but extremely strong in quite a twitch-intensive, low time-to-kill shooter - things like buffing your max HP or turning on big head mode for the enemy team, to transformative rule changes which turn the whole map into an icy slip-and-slide or delete one of the bomb sites entirely.The cards add a third metagame to your pre-match preparations, as you have to simultaneously consider not just your weapon and hero choice, but how the cards you and your team have picked interact with all of your other decisions.The cards can bring you so many strategies and bring so much depth, Xin Chang, Fragpunk creative director, says. We want the game to be more creative and add so many crazy ideas because the cards implement different, strange ideas.If you make a traditional competitive shooter game, you dont have the chance to bring so many turning points because maybe players care more about the balance or they dont accept so many changes to each round. But our feature is the change, so thats okay. You really need to play your cards right. | Image credit: NeteaseMany of the character abilities in Fragpunk feel very strong, from weapon skills like Brokers built-in rocket launcher and Hollowpoints one-shot one-kill sniper, to far-reaching teleports on Corona and Serket, Sonars muffling and Kismets enemy detection.The combination of powerful, often explosive, hero abilities and this constant ruleset shake-up gives Fragpunk a tangibly unique edge that could make every round feel exciting if Bad Guitar Studio can avoid a situation where some cards are so obviously better than others that they become an auto-pick.With all of these huge effects going off at once, Fragpunk can also feel chaotic and theres definitely a learning curve where it seems like youre getting blown away in one hit quite often, however, the intended direction for the game as players progress is away from ability spam and more towards strategic team-play and advanced movement.Our chaos comes from the cards. Thats why were very careful about making new cards, Xin explains. At least at first, we dont want new cards to be very overpowered - even though we play with a ban pick, we still try to make each card not OP, its very important.Chaos makes a game very fun to play and very casual. But if players play the game for a very long time as competitive players and develop their game skill they gain more control over winning and losing. It shouldnt be very chaotic. If its too much chaos and you dont have a way to win its basically luck. Thats what we dont want.Thats why weve made some strategies to make the game more competitive. Keep your eye on the competition. | Image credit: NeteaseOne of the ways Fragpunk brings these competitive strategies into the game is with the pace of play. Movement is designed to be fast and smooth, but not super-fast like Apex Legends.Bad Guitar has tried to find a sweet spot where things like bunny jumping and other advanced movement techniques are possible and encourage players to incorporate movement into their play rather than just standing still and shooting, but arent the main determining factor in whether you win a gunfight.The end result is supposed to reward a players skill with a marginal advantage that makes a solid difference in tight situations, but its apparently been a tough compromise to strike, as overturning movement can also lead to oppressive gameplans too.Some characters are very strong and we need to do some work on that balance. In our tests we found that players who can rush are very strong, Xin says. To take an example, we dont feel like its very healthy to have lots of characters who can rush into the point because its not very technical. Its very hard to defend them and makes the core gameplay more boring because you can just rush every time and take the spot. There's a wealth of Shard Cards tht you can choose from. | Image credit: NeteaseFor this example, we will nerf these kinds of characters. But if a character is strong in controlling the map or slowing the pace, we think its okay. We think thats healthier. Its good to keep that in the game and we dont want to make that kind of change, even if its strong.So it seems like the aim, almost counter-intuitively, behind strong character abilities is to act as a deterrent which slows the game down. Then, rather than relying on consistently overpowered hero abilities or ultra-fast movement to give matches a natural sense of speed, Fragpunk instead creates a flow by introducing a natural imbalance thats central to a roaring debate within competitive FPS games: team sizes.6v6 came along with Overwatch and we tried it in our maps, but it didnt work, Xin concedes. If youre 6v6 you can equally divide 3 people at A and 3 people at B, so it looks very balanced. But we found that its essential in a bomb defusal mode that your defending force at A, B and mid is not balanced.When its not balanced players can come up with different strategies, but when theres an equal number of players theres an optimal distribution, theres one best solution for defending. Thats too solid.Thats why for the game mode thats more similar to Counter Strike its 5v5, it cant be 6v6. But for the mode more similar to Overwatch, I think its okay because theyre totally different games - not like an FPS but more like a MOBA. You need to have a tank, a healer, a DPS, and that works. But for a bomb defusal mode its a proven solution and why were still 5v5.But within that 5v5 framework, there still look to be a huge amount of options for players immediately at launch, with more than a dozen characters, a full suite of weapons and over 100 Shard Cards. So while Fragpunk is free-to-play and will receive updates after launch, its not in Early Access. It somehow looks exactly like Fortnite and Apex at the same time? | Image credit: NeteaseIt also seems to be taking a more player-centred approach to the F2P model thats thankfully becoming more common, with battle passes that dont expire once youve bought them, skill-based match-making in ranked, but not in casual modes, and customisable cross-play with both console and PC, or neither if you prefer.Bad Guitar is a NetEase Games studio and it will be interesting to see if Fragpunk follows a similar trajectory to NetEases other recent competitive shooter, Marvel Rivals, which was wildly successful, but ultimately laid off its entire US-based development team soon after launch.Fragpunk obviously doesnt have the immediate grabber of the Marvel license, but what it does have is a genuinely unique central mechanic in Shard Cards, exciting and intense shooting, huge abilities, exciting character design and what looks like a broad enough content offering to maintain a playerbase once the launch hype has died down.I feel its an essential trend for online service games to have enough content when they launch, Xin states. If you have the ability to provide enough content, you should. I think for Early Access, purely, its because the team is small and they dont have enough efficiency for making enough content so they use Early Access to get some income to maintain development.I think if you have this kind of efficiency then you need to do as much as you can and be well prepared.Fragpunk launches on March 6 on PlayStation and Xbox consoles and on PC via Steam and the Epic Games Store. Bad Guitar is investigating the possibility of a Nintendo Switch 2 port.